1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a program and a method for providing a view of relationships between objects. More particularly, the present invention relates to an object relationship display program and method for producing view data representing relationships between objects to be released for downloading.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many software vendors have their own web pages to allow customers to download their products or other various objects. Such objects released for downloading purposes include software patches (i.e., revision programs for released software), software products, and device drivers. The user selects a desired object in a web page that the vendor offers for object download purposes, and downloads the selected object to his/her terminal device.
Such web pages make various information available, which includes a list of downloadable objects, relationships between those objects, and other up-to-date information on the objects themselves. The relationships between objects include dependence, absorption, and exclusion, for example. Here, dependence between two objects refers to such a relationship that one object should not be installed until after the other object is installed. Absorption refers to such a relationship that one object has been absorbed by the other object. Exclusion refers to such a relationship that two objects cannot coexist in a single system. Accordingly, the user has to take inter-object relationships into consideration when downloading and installing objects, by consulting the description of each specific object, such as object relationship information and current status of each object.
FIG. 17 shows an example of a conventional web page that offers objects for downloading. The illustrated patch details screen 900 appears on a user's terminal device when he/she visits a website publishing downloadable objects and opens a specific web page providing details of patch “112841-07” in an attempt to download the patch.
This patch details screen 900 shows one-to-many relationships that the present patch “112841-07” bears to other patches. For example, the “Depended-Upon Patches” section 901 shows four patches on which the present patch depends. Likewise, the “Absorbing Patches” section 902 indicates that there is one patch that has absorbed the present patch. The patch details screen 900 further shows that there are no exclusive patches.
Structure tree is one of the suitable forms of representation for inter-object relationships such as dependence and absorption. That is, the relationships between objects can be visualized in structure tree form by mapping objects to nodes and their relationships to links between the nodes. When there is a change in the inter-object relationships, the tree has to be updated to reflect the change. To facilitate the editing of a structure tree, there is proposed a tree structure view editor (e.g., Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-140716, paragraph Nos. 0015 to 0022, FIG. 2).
Conventional web pages publishing downloadable objects show inter-object relationships in text form or table form as discussed in FIG. 17. This conventional technique provides sufficient information about one-to-one relationships or one-to-many relationships with respect to a specific object of interest. It is, however, difficult for the user to get the whole picture of related patches.
Since the conventional technique simply provides a list of relationships between two objects, the user has to trace the links of object relationships including dependence, absorption, and exclusion and combine the findings into an entire picture in his/her brain. This task is very time-consuming. Take patch “112841-07” in FIG. 17, for example. The “Depended-Upon Patches” section 901 tells the user that there are four patches “112233-05,” “112840-01,” “113445-01,” and “114390-01” upon which the subject patch “112841-07” is dependent. If those patches have dependence relationships with other patches, the user has to consult the details of each such patch in an attempt to investigate their relationships. The user repeats this operation until he/she reaches an independent patch, expending considerable labor.
Since dependent objects cannot be installed until after installation of the objects that they depend upon, the user is required to do the burdensome tasks of identifying all the linked objects and downloading them individually. Moreover, when installing those downloaded objects, the user has to have clear idea of in what order the objects should be installed, not to violate their dependence relationships. This considerably raises the total burden imposed on the user. Particularly in the case of handling a large number of objects, there would be more chances of skipping necessary objects or selecting wrong objects during the download or installation.
Finding alternatives for an obsolete patch could also be a problem. Suppose, for example, that a user installed some patch in the past, but the patch was entered afterwards to a non-released state. In most such cases, the information about obsolete patches is no longer available for access. It is therefore difficult for the user to track down the latest patch corresponding to his/her patch.
Using a structure tree to visualize inter-object relationships would make it easier for the user to understand overall relationships between objects. However, the task of tracing the links of object relationships has conventionally been up to human operators, meaning that an additional workload of analyzing a structure tree is imposed on them. The tree structure view editor described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-140716, paragraph Nos. 0015 to 0022, FIG. 2 still requires the operator to take time and work to understand relationships between objects since it is rather designed to support editing work.